It is interesting to see how familiar websites have
evolved over the years. If you began using the Internet when I did back in the early 1990s, you remember the 4800
baud dialup connections and
watching
the little globe on the Mosaic
browser spin round and round while waiting for a website to appear. Your anticipation with each new website was a
mixture of emotions - willing to suffer the long download times for the treat of seeing cool looking graphics (VGA
quality in 256 colors if you were lucky), but being somewhat relieved by all text in order to have a reasonable
page load time. Still, it was a big improvement over dialing into local bulletin board services, using a copy of
Kermit in hopes of finding a useful
file.
CompuServe and AOL made things a bit better for the layman...
for a while.

Page
content has greatly increased over time for a number of reasons, mainly due to larger display sizes, faster
connections, and the importance of conveying as much relevant information as possible on a single page. As
recently as the year 2000, standard computer display screen resolution was still somewhere around
800 x 600 pixels (today it is
1024 x 768). Also as
of 2000, most home users had a dialup connection with speeds in the
56k baud range, although actually
getting a connection anywhere near 56k baud was rare. Even wireless portable devices of today are realizing data
transfer speeds better than what we had ten years ago, so tolerating loading of modest size pages is fairly easy.
Finally, as the Internet became an increasingly important venue for conducting business, gathering information
and, more recently, personal relationships (sigh!), web page content increased in hopes of wowing and capturing
the interest of visitors, thereby having them realize that yours is the best page they have ever found and is
worth bookmarking for frequent returns.

In the early days of the Internet, conscientious web designers
attempted to use minimal graphics and rely on thoughtful page layout using HTML formatting to place text and
tables in strategic areas to give the illusion of a graphical page without the bandwidth burden. Unbelievably,
there were websites that consisted of a single large graphic that contained all the pictures and text; they took
forever to load and presented you with a blank screen until all the bits had transferred. Overly wasteful Flash
type entry screens are modern day equivalents of that. Many of us studied reports on Web user likes and dislikes
for site features, and attempted to accommodate those wishes so as to maximize the visitor's positive impression.

As
time went by and broadband connections sped up, it became possible to integrate a larger amount of graphics and
text to present more information to the visitor without the time penalty. Search engine optimization (SEO) now
dominates web page design philosophy more than anything else since it can profoundly affect the order in which
pages are returned during searches. While page ranking algorithms (PageRank)
are very complex, the most highly weighted factor is the number of websites that link back to your website,
although existing traffic to the page is also a strong contributor.

The
Wayback™ Machine, provided by the website
Archive.org, captures and stores snapshots of web pages over time,
so you can go there, enter the website address of interest, and probably discover what the website looked like
many years ago. It contains almost 2 petabytes of data and is currently growing at a rate of 20 terabytes per
month. "This eclipses the amount of text contained in the world's largest libraries, including the Library of
Congress." Records begin around 1996.

For
those how are not familiar with the concept, the Wayback Machine was first a feature of a cartoon from back in the
1960s. It was used by Mr. Peabody (a talking dog) as part of his "Peabody's Improbable History" program where he
and his trusty boy companion, Sherman (no, he doesn't bark), travel back in time to explore an inane version of
bygone world and U.S. events. It was corny.

Archival websites like Archive.org, Google, and others, are used quite often by law enforcement and legal
researchers to gather evidence for trials. Recent events in U.S. politics have exposed situations where websites
would pull down information after a public outcry had challenged a person or organization for their statements
and/or policies. People are learning that in this Information Age, everything they say can and will be
used against them, even if they thought it was only to be seen/heard by a privileged few. Even employers are
searching archives of web pages in their vetting of potential employees. You have been warned.

I decided to
take a look at what the websites of RF Cafe's advertisers looked like in the days of yore. Most had at least one
screen shot in the archives. All screen captures are done in the same browser window size (just wide enough to
enclose the RF Cafe screen), and then proportionally resized to a common height, so the change in page width is
apparent. Some web pages were (and still are) set up to automatically fill the available browser width, like
RFMD's, so a width comparison is not possible. They are in random order below, so you might want to do a Crtl+F to
search for a company name on the screen.

In some cases the company is a conglomeration of multiple other
formerly independent companies, like with Spectrum Microwave which includes the former Salisbury Engineering,
Q-Bit, Amplifonix, and others. With those, I tried to find examples of the former company's web pages. Also, for
some reason the Wayback™ Machine
does not always capture the graphic images associated with the page, so in the place of the intended images are
the white placeholders and the annoying little red "x." Because of that, I do not
always have the earliest available screen shot here, but instead used the most complete page available. Some
websites are so new that the
Wayback™ Machine has not found them yet.

You can see in the first example that RF Cafe has changed just a little since its inception in 1999. It was
originally a step up from my RFTools website on the AOL personal homepage system. RFTools.com was not available,
and the [Something]Cafe.com type names were popular at the time, so
RFCafe.com was born. It has since grown to be a major player in the RF engineering web space. Because of
dedicated visitors (like you), my many advertisers have provided the opportunity for me to run RF Cafe on a
full-time basis. Thanks to them and to you.

Let me know if you would like to have your company's website
added to the list.